Mr. Cooper’s reporting career has taken him from the shack, the dingy press room at One Police Plaza in New York, to Room 9, the cramped reporter’s quarters at City Hall, to the grand, arched press room at the Capitol in Albany — which does have desks, telephones and computers in addition to its poker table, pool table and two pianos. He was the Albany bureau chief during the last years of the Pataki era and for the first few months of the prelapsarian Spitzer administration. He has also covered the 2000 presidential campaign and its overtime rounds in Florida, and reported on plane crashes, hurricanes, an oil spill and other assorted mayhem.

Mr. Cooper, a lapsed musician, joined The Times in 1990 as a night copy boy at the end of his freshman year in college, and became a reporter on the Metropolitan staff in 1995 after spending a couple of years as a stringer in the paper’s Boston bureau. His work has been recognized by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, the Society of Silurians, the New York Press Club and the Legislative Correspondents Association. Born and raised in New York City, Mr. Cooper graduated from Stuyvesant High School and Columbia College.